Woman behind the doll

"It was a 'what if?' thing," Nancy Oliver said one recent morning, explaining how she got the idea for her debut screenplay, Lars and the Real Girl. "Like, 'What if we didn't treat our mentally ill people like animals? What if we brought kindness and compassion to the table?' "

Those soul-searching questions are perhaps not the ones that spring to mind when you consider the story of a man and his sex doll. When the movie begins, we meet Lars Lindstrom (Ryan Gosling), a churchgoing 27-year-old recluse so lonely that he purchases a life-size companion on the Internet. He promptly introduces it around town as Bianca, his half-Danish, half-Brazilian, wheelchair-using, missionary girlfriend.

If Lars and the Real Girl were an episode of Six Feet Under, the twisty HBO series for which Oliver worked as a writer and co-producer for three years, the rest of the tale might have gotten its laughs and winces by showing what goes on in the bedroom between a troubled guy and a curvy, pouty-lipped woman who just happens to be made of flesh-toned silicone rubber. Instead, the movie, directed by Craig Gillespie, takes an almost Capraesque turn: Everyone in Lars' gray, wintry town makes an It's a Wonderful Life-style group decision to support him by going along with his fantasy.

It may be difficult for marketers to communicate the movie's humanistic message because of the prurient-sounding plot. "Lars might at first sound like a movie you wouldn't want your kids to see," is how The Hollywood Reporter put it, "but it has a heart of gold."

If a pal were to try to entice Oliver into meeting at the local cinema by reading that very sentence, though, it's likely that person would end up going alone.

"She's got this fiercely unsentimental thing," said Alan Ball, a close friend of Oliver's who, as the creator of Six Feet Under and True Blood, HBO's new vampire soap opera that counts Oliver as a writer, has also been her boss. "Sometimes I'll call her and say, 'Hey, do you want to see this movie?' and she'll say: 'No. It sounds like it's going to be uplifting.' But if I say, 'There's this great French apocalyptic thriller where everyone gets blown up,' she's like, 'I'm in.' "

It was back in 1976 ("you do the addition," Oliver joked when asked her age) that she and Ball, then both studying theater at Florida State University in Tallahassee, met and began collaborating. As founders of the satirical ensemble the General Nonsense Theater Company, the two wrote, starred in and helped stage subversive and biting comic sketches and, for a spell, performed in a nameless band with Oliver as the vocalist.

Ball, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of American Beauty, who credits her with his decision to switch from acting to writing, spent years imploring his friend to move to Los Angeles. In 1997, Oliver finally made the move when a company she worked for - Oliver was a writer-for-hire on an Internet game called Riana Rouge, about an abused secretary who is blasted into another dimension - relocated to the West Coast.

Oliver turned enigmatic when asked about the spark for Lars. "I had a weird job that I can't talk about," she said. "But I had to deal with a lot of Web sites and a lot of lonely guys." She did volunteer that after contemplating the concept for about five years, she wrote the script in a nine-month flurry in 2002.

The following year, after she had joined the Six Feet Under staff, her agent asked if she had any projects to shop around. Not much later, Lars and the Real Girl was ranked No. 3 on the 2005 edition of The Black List, a compilation of the most-liked unproduced scripts in Hollywood.

By the time Gosling was cast, he said, Lars was more than just another role. "It was such a respected script," he said. "There was a certain level of fear on my part because whenever I'd mention it to people, there was always a 'don't ruin it' involved."